Paranormality: Why we see what isn't there (18 page)

Encouraged by his investigations with the pendulum, Wegner turned his attention to the most mysterious of all Spiritualist phenomena – automatic writing. His work was to provide a solution to one of the most taxing philosophical problems of all time.

Mark Twain and the Grand Illusion

Perhaps the most prolific and impressive of all automatic writers was Pearl Curran
⁷³
.
 
. Born in 1883 in St Louis, the first 30 years of Curran’s life were uneventful, and involved dropping out of high school, trying her hand at various jobs, getting married and teaching music. Then, on 8 July 1913 everything changed. While using an Ouija board to chat with the dead an unusually strong and dominant spirit emerged. The entity explained that her name was Patience Worth and that she had been born in the seventeenth century in Dorset, England, but in later life had taken a ship to America where she was eventually murdered by ‘Indians’. Trying her hand at automatic writing, Curran discovered that she could easily channel Ms Worth. In fact, the communications came thick and fast for the next 25 years, with Patience eventually ‘dictating’ over 5,000 poems, a play and several novels. The quality of the work was as impressive as the quantity. When reviewing Worth’s novel about the final days of Jesus, a reviewer at the
New York Globe
favourably compared it to
Ben Hur
while another critic believed it to be ‘the greatest story of Christ penned since the Gospels’.
 

Unfortunately for Spiritualism, Curran’s writings failed to provide convincing evidence of life after death. Try as they might, researchers were unable to find any evidence that Patience Worth actually existed, and linguistic analysis of the texts revealed that the language was not consistent with other works from the period. The case for authenticity was not helped by Patience writing a novel set in the Victorian times, some 200 years after her own death. Eventually even the most ardent believer was forced to conclude that Pearl Curran’s remarkable outpourings were more likely to have a natural, not supernatural, explanation.
 

Additional evidence against the spirit hypothesis came from those who claimed to be able to channel famous authors. There's the rather bizarre case of Emily Grant Hutchings, a close friend of Curran, who claimed to be in touch with the spirit of Mark Twain (think ‘gravy train’). In 1917 she produced
Jap Herron
, a novel that Hutchings claimed had been dictated to her by the great man himself. Critics were deeply unimpressed, with one noting:

"If this is the best that Mark Twain can do by reaching across the barrier, his admirers will all hope that he will hereafter respect that boundary."

Harper and Brothers, who owned the rights to the work produced by Mark Twain when he was earthbound, took legal action, claiming that the poor quality of
Jap Herron
damaged their sales. As part of their evidence, Harper and Brothers noted that Twain was deeply sceptical about the afterlife and so seemed an especially unlikely candidate as a spirit author. The media had a field day, noting that the Supreme Court would soon have to rule on the issue of immortality. Unfortunately, the case never made it into the courtroom, with Hutchings and her publisher agreeing to withdraw the book from sale prior to the trial.
 

Assuming that the dead do not have a hand in automatic writing, what are we to make of this curious phenomenon? Until the mid-1990s by far the most popular explanation involved some form of psychological dissociation. According to this argument, it is possible for some peoples’ consciousnesses to become divided into two, with each identity unaware of the other, despite them inhabiting the same brain. It is a strange idea, but nevertheless received widespread support, in part because at the time it was the only show in town. Suddenly everyone and their dog was seen as having multiple personalities and it wasn’t long before the idea made it into the world of psychiatry, with clinicians encouraging their patients to experiment with automatic writing as a way of accessing the issues that lay buried deep within their ‘subconscious’ self.

However, after studying various cases of this strange phenomenon it was again Dan Wegner who advanced a new and radical way of explaining automatic writing. Unlike previous explanations, his idea did not involve the existence of multiple identities trapped within the same skull. Moreover, if he's correct, his work helps solve one of the most hotly debated issues in the history of science.
 

On the face of it, free will doesn’t seem especially contentious. You make a decision to move your wrist and your wrist moves. You decide to lift your leg and up it comes. So far, so what? However, this simple scenario has hidden depths.
 

Most scientists believe that all of your conscious mental life is the direct result of activity within your brain. For example, right at this moment you are reading the words on this page. Light enters your eyes and triggers cells at the back of your retina. These, in turn, send signals to the visual cortex in your brain, which sets about recognising the letters and words, and then conveys the required information to the parts of the brain that are able to extract the meaning from the sentences. The process might be extremely complex and difficult to understand, but fundamentally it is all taking place in your eyes and brain.
 

But when making decisions suddenly, the model doesn’t feel quite right. I am going to ask you to make a decision. You can either continue to read this paragraph or go and make a cup of tea. Regardless of your choice, my guess is that it didn’t feel like your brain at work. You didn’t suddenly feel a rush of blood to the front of your brain, followed by a quick spurt in your left hemisphere. Instead, it felt as if it was ‘you’, and not a series of electrical impulses in the lump of meat between your ears, that made the decision.
 

Wegner’s neat and clever solution to this mystery involves positing that the sense of ‘you’ as decision maker is actually a grand illusion created by your brain
⁷⁴
.
 
According to him, your brain makes every decision in your life including, for example, whether you should stand up, say something or wave your arms around. However, a split second after making each decision your brain does two things. First, it sends a signal to another part of the brain that creates the conscious experience of making the decision, and second, it delays the signal going to your legs, mouth or arms. As a result, ‘you’ experience the ‘I have just made this decision’ signal, see yourself act in a way that is consistent with that signal, and incorrectly conclude that ‘you’ are in the driving seat. In short, you are the ghost in the machine.

BOX

THE HELPING HANDS ILLUSION 

Many years ago I performed magic on the streets of London’s Covent Garden. My act involved selecting a man from the audience and placing a cloak completely around his body. I would then stand behind the man, have him place his hands behind his back, and poke my hands out of two slits in the front of the cloak. To the audience it looked as though the man’s hands were poking through the front of the cloak. In reality, they were seeing my hands, not his, and so I could perform tricks and make the man appear to be an expert magician.
 

Psychologist Daniel Wegner has used exactly the same type of set-up to illustrate another curious aspect of free will. To carry out his demonstration you will need a mirror and a friend. Stand in front of the mirror and have your friend stand behind you. Next, place your hands behind your back and ask your friend to poke their arms under your arms. Now look in the mirror. All being well, your friend’s arms will look like your arms (if you are struggling to create this illusion try both wearing black tops). Now have your friend read out the following instructions and then make the appropriate actions with
their
hands

 
Clench your right hand into a fist three times

Clench your left hand into a fist three times

Wave at the mirror with your right hand

Turn both of your hands palm up and then palm down

Clap your hands together twice

Because your brain finds visual feedback more compelling than movement-related feedback, you should feel as if your friend’s hands belong to you and that you are in control of them.

END BOX

All sorts of clever experiments are put forward by Wegner to support his idea that ou
r feeling of free will is little more than a grand illusion, including one especially curious study conducted by physiologist Benjamin Libet from the University of California in San Francisco in the 1980s
⁷⁵
.
 

Imagine travelling back through time and taking part in Libet’s experiment. After arriving at his laboratory and having a nice cup of tea, you are taken into a small room and have several small electrodes placed on your head and forearm. Next you are sat in front of small screen displaying a dot moving in a circle, like the seconds hand of a clock. You are asked to flex your wrist whenever you like, but to report the position of the dot each time you make the decision to flex. After a few wrist flexes the experimenters remove the various electrodes and thank you for your participation.
 

Like Faraday’s study into table-turning, Libet’s experiment is as simple as it is ingenious. His experimental set-up measured participants’ brain activity, forearm activity and the precise moment that the person thought they decided to move their wrist, allowing him to plot the exact time that each event took place. Libet’s data showed a large amount of brain activity about a third of a second
before
each participant said that they made the decision to move their wrist. In short, exactly as predicted by Wegner, your brain appears to make a decision before you are conscious of it.

Libet’s experiment is not the only one to suggest that our brain operates before we are aware of it. In the early 1960s neurophysiologist and robotician William Grey Walter asked participants to look at a projection screen and press a button to advance a series of photographic slides one at a time
⁷⁶
.
 
The participants were connected to various sensors that measured activity in the area of their brain associated with hand movements. Although the participants didn’t know it, Grey Walter had hooked the output from these sensors directly to the slide projector to ensure that it was the participant’s brain activity, not their button presses, that changed the slides. Exactly as predicted by Wegner’s theory of free will, the participants were amazed to discover that
the slideshow seemed to predict their decisions
.
 

How does all of this explain automatic writing? Wegner believes that in some people the ‘make a decision then create a conscious experience of that decision’ mechanism malfunctions. The brain makes the decision to act, and sends the right messages to the appropriate muscles, but fails to send the signals responsible for creating the conscious experience of ‘you’ making the decision. In automatic writing this results in people scribbling away but with no idea that they are responsible for their jottings. Wegner argues that the phenomenon provides a unique and important insight into the fundamental nature of free will. During such episodes the illusion suddenly breaks down and we are revealed to be the robots that we really are. Automatic writing is not some freak show oddity, but rather reflects the true nature of our everyday behaviour.

Spiritualists were convinced that their techniques for talking to the dead were pushing back the frontiers of science. They were right, albeit for completely the wrong reasons. These seemingly supernatural phenomena had nothing to do with contacting the spirits, but did yield important insights into the unconscious. Scientific investigations into table-turning and the Ouija board resulted in the discovery of ideomotor action, while similar work with pendulums revealed why people often indulge in the very behaviour that they are trying to avoid. The study of automatic writing played an important role in the development of Wegner’s ingenious solution to the age-old philosophical problem of free will. Together, this impressive body of work showed that the unconscious plays a far bigger role in determining behaviour than was previously thought. Merely think about any type of activity causes your unconscious mind to automatically and immediately prepare your body to act. By trying not to behave in a certain way you interfere with the usually efficient way that your unconscious controls your actions. And the feeling of free will that you are experiencing right now may well be nothing more than a grand illusion. Ideomotor movements allow you to act in the blink of an eye, the ‘rebound effect’ has helped explain why many people struggle to quit smoking and lose weight, and Wegner’s solution to the free will problem suggests that your brain makes up its mind a fraction of a second before you think that you have made a decision. And all because two young girls once tied an apple to a string, secretly bounced it on the floor, and fooled the world into thinking that it was possible to talk with the dead.
 

It would be nice to think that modern minds would not be fooled by the ideomotor effects behind table-tipping, Ouija boards and pendulums. Nice, but wrong. Several companies recently claimed to have developed a new form of bomb detector, stating that their product could be employed by the police and military to find concealed explosives, narcotics, and weapons. Operators use the device by inserting a substance-specific ‘detection card’ into a handheld unit and then walking around until the antenna swings towards the target substance. The Iraqi government spent millions of pounds on hundreds of the devices, deploying them at checkpoints to replace time-consuming physical inspections. As with any dowsing rod, the swinging of the antenna was due to unconscious muscle movements, and tests conducted by the American military revealed that the devices were unable to detect explosives. Unfortunately, by then the damage had been done, with hundreds of civilians being killed by bombs that had passed through the checkpoints undetected. In 1853 Michael Faraday concluded his investigation into the science of table-turning by noting that he was somewhat ashamed of his work, wishing that ‘in the present age . . . it ought not to have been required’. Over a hundred and fifty years later it seems that his research is as timely as ever.